The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

-- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

-- Karl Marx, speech, 1856

Dreams are not so different from deeds as some may think. All the deeds of men are only dreams at first. And in the end, their deeds dissolve into dreams.

-- Theodore Herzel, Old New Land, 1902

A country is never as poor as when it seems filled with riches.

-- Laozi quoted in the Yan tie lun,

A Discourse on Salt and Iron, 81 B.C.

At the time when Pope Pius VII had to leave Rome, which had been conquered by revolutionary French, the committee of the Chamber of Commerce in London was considering the herring fishery. One member of the committee observed that, since the Pope had been forced to leave Rome, Italy was probably going to become a Prtestant country. "Heaven help us," cried another member. "What," responded the first, "would you be upset to see the number of good Protestants increase?" "No," the other answered," it isn't that, but suppose there are no more Catholics, what shall we do with our herring?"

-- Alexander Dumas, Le grand dictionnaire de cuisine, 1873

I bought the rock in Spanish Catalonia, in the rundown hillside mining town of Cardonia. (Introduction)

Once I stood on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacked issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, "We Chinese invented many things!"